1. Field of the Invention
The present invention relates to a method for generating full-page print data, and more particularly to a method for generating full-page print data to a laser printer.
2. Description of the Prior Art
As laser printer technologies improve, printers can create higher image resolution pages, and the amount of raster data needed to be transmitted to a printer to print an image also increases, adversely affecting printer performance. When an image is scaled and dithered before it is sent to a printer, an 8 by 10 inch raster image requires 0.9 Mbytes of data for a 300 DPI device, 3.6 Mbytes for a 600 DPI device, and 14.4 Mbytes of data for a 1200 DPI device.
The prior art method for generating print data to a laser printer is inefficient. For example, during the procedure of generating the print data, because all objects of the document are compared with each other by performing raster operations (ROPs), it is time-consuming to combine these objects if a document has many.
Furthermore, because of the characteristics of laser printers, a corresponding full-page image must be prepared before any one page is printed so that a a large memory capacity is needed to temporarily store processing data during the generation of the full-page image.